The View From The Other Side

Tonight I am the bump up Supervisor. In other words for one night I am in management. Now i've been a bump up supe before and I have to admit I have done my fair share of complaining about the regular supervisors. So I will try to express my views as a mechanic/supervisor or as I like to call it "The View From The Other Side".

Being a product of the "Old School" I tend not to complain too much to management because I feel it is always better to leave them out of the loop so to speak, if not you are inviting them to get too involved in the whole maintenance thing. My main complaint about mechanics when I'm being bump up supe is the persons who tend to spend an awful lot of time complaining about the work load or fainess of the work assignments etc. I do not understand the need to do these things but I know a lot of people do.

The supe should be involved only as much as necessary. If there is a real problem, a real problem, then the supe should get involved. If there is trouble, real trouble, by all means go get the supe. The problem I see from this side of the desk is that there is way too much merit or even ear time given to the few people that complain about the majority of things. These few people (of course) get the majority of the supes attention and really in an unfair and un-needed way. It's the squeaky wheel syndrome and I guess its inevitable.

When I'm supe I try to run the shop the way it ran when I first got hired on(we had no supe!). I always think I sound like an old man when I start this reminiscing but here we go. back in the old days we had no supe. The Lead Mechanic came in, put the work on the board and the mechanics came in and signed up for whatever work they wanted to do. This accomplished two things: first, there was a certain self motivation factor. People tended to come to work and start working right away. When the work is assigned there is no motivation to start right away, I'll just wait until they assign me and start then. The second thing not assigning work accomplished was a kind of healthy competition among the mechanics. We were always going back and forth about "I did this" or "I fixed that" etc. No body seems to care now and it seems like it is an actual chore when you are assigned work versus volunteering to do it.

New School - Old School.